After a recent debate I had in a comment section about whether or not 2 gigs of RAM was enough for a modern workload, I started customizing to make it happen.
In my first screenshot (second in post body) you can see my specs in a neofetch and cpufetch output. I'm running a custom Kernel to bring my RAM usage as low as humanly possible while still maintaining support for all my hardware, I am on round 1 of kernel minimizing, only things I was 100% sure i didnt need have been removed. Round 2 will be removing things I might need but not frequently, I will be leaving a second kernel installed to access them.
GTK themes are listed because I have lxqt installed, I try my best not to use it though.
In my second screenshot (first in post body) you can see from left to right, top to bottom:
- Links with a DDG search
- offpunk browsing a gemlog
- turbo with a sample of my writing (it isn't good, I don't pretend to be a writer)
- a neofetch output
- discordo, called by a shell script that runs it with my bot token (self bots are against discord's TOS, do not make them, or do idgaf its your account)
I am using the Ultima theme (https://github.com/egorlem/ultima.zsh-theme.git) for Oh-My-Zsh
Terminal frontend is Sakura but I used Terminator to customize my terminal colors as Sakura only allows you to change your Background and Foreground colors.
Firefox ESR will open, and can navigate to lite.duckduckgo.com or other lightweight sites. Attempting to use multiple tabs results in OOM killer killing firefox, or the whole system locking up, whichever comes first.
This machine exists as an exercise in ascetism. By denying myself modern amenities I seek to free myself from distraction, enabling me to do more, higher quality work.
Mostly just text editors and terminal apps. For me, this is a good thing, for most I assume its a dealbreaker.
Occasionally I'll boot the machine off a USB HDD with windows 95 on it for retro gaming. It handles that like a champ.
Do you have a large swap? Seems like that should keep it from completely freezing and just result in extreme slowing.
lol at the retro gaming. ;]
I've got a 8GB swap drive nowadays (yes I know its awful for flash memory, idc) but the vm.swappiness isn't adjustable on FreeBSD so it just simply isn't swappy enough. Rarely ever goes above 128MB swap in use, it orefers to crash.
Its not an active project for me as of right now but I plan to make a tool to adjust the swappiness at some point when I figure out what chunk of code is responsible for it in the kernel. At that point I'll be able to use it to drastically increase memory related stability, until then though the 2005 era business PC remains a lumbering creature, with much care needed to keep it from crashing.